1550–1630

Abstract

Seeds of today’s “traditional,” academic school curriculum—a curriculum covering all the major fields of knowledge, are visible as far back as the midsixteenth century.¹ This is not to say that they grew from nothing. The idea that education should be based on all the different forms of knowledge is at least as old as Plato; while the notion of the seven liberal arts—the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—appeared in the fifth century A.D. In medieval and Renaissance university circles this was the notional, ideal scheme for the arts course, although in practice the latter tended to be restricted to the subjects of the trivium alone (Ong 1958: 138).